


Once upon a time

by BagIceSacrifice2021



Series: Boarding school AU [2]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Adrien Agreste Is Sunshine, Chloé Bourgeois Being Chloé Bourgeois, Chloé Bourgeois Redemption, Gen, Good Chloé Bourgeois, Good Friend Adrien Agreste, Good Friend Chloé Bourgeois, Lesbian Chloé Bourgeois
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-14 03:53:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29661333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BagIceSacrifice2021/pseuds/BagIceSacrifice2021
Summary: Chloé and Adrien, the founders of the "Our parents forget we exist but it's okay because memes are a valid coping mechanism cHlOé" club (yeah they needed a shorter name), have known each other since they were nine months old, there for each other when no one else was. Now though? Now she's being shipped off to some village in England five hours away, without any way to contact her childhood best friend.---Or Chloé reminisces about the past seven years.---This can be read on it's own, it's set before "As long as the stars shine". It's only in the series because it's set in the same au, but could just be a backstory for Chloé and Adrien's friendship in the original show
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir & Chloé Bourgeois, André Bourgeois & Chloé Bourgeois, Audrey Bourgeois & Chloé Bourgeois
Series: Boarding school AU [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2177670





	Once upon a time

**Author's Note:**

> Sandwich is a real place in Kent I swear  
> I think I went there once 5 years ago and it rained for 3 days  
> Welcome to the UK ig  
> But umm, yeah, apart from the whole "going to Kent" thing (which is only relevant to As long as the stars shine), this is just a collection of headcanons about Chloe and Adrien's friendship thrown into a short fic because I can.

So maybe her parents were emotionally absent, and her mother sometimes forgot her name, but that was just a normal part of growing up, right? Teaching her to be independent and capable of controlling her emotions. It was all... fine. Besides, Adrien's parents were just as crappy, and so was Kagami's mother. Everything was fine. It had to be.

But if everything was fine, why was she on a train to Kent, preparing to spend the next three years in England with her grandmother? Her father said it was because him and Audrey were going to New York for a while, her mother said it was because she was unbearable to be around, at this point, she couldn't find it in herself to care. Maybe it would have been bearable if she could still see Adrien, still rely on her only friend, message him at least, but her grandmother had insisted she wouldn't need her phone in Kent, so she was well and truly alone.

Her grandmother lived in some small town called Sandwich, and had rambled on at Chloé for hours about it. ("A twelve minute bike ride to the beach Chloé!" "Such lovely beaches!" "We can go rock collecting!") The young blonde thought it was ridiculous, but her Grandmother was perhaps the only decent parental figure in her life, and she didn't have much of a choice.

She lent her head against the window, sitting up immediately at the uncomfortable vibrations of the train. Her breath had left a small circle on the glass, her fingers tracing stick figures into it absent mindedly. It reminded her of the time her and Adrien had taken the trip to Marseille, it was for some photo shoot for a collaboration between Gabriel and Style Queen, and while the actual modelling was rather boring, her and Adrien had enjoyed the trip, spending the majority of it running around beaches, laughing and building sandcastles and trying to jump over the waves or shoo them away. They'd been six at the time, only two years younger than they were now, but it felt like an eternity ago, some untouchable paradise neither could really return to. That had been the last time her parents had hid their arguments from her, the last time her mother had called her by her real name, the last time they'd been real parents. Emilie had still been around then, her and Gabriel so sickeningly in love, talking about second children and finally getting married and kissing and giggling, Adrien and Chloé had gagged at the sight, but deep down they were both happy about it.

Really it was thanks to Emilie and Gabriel being lovesick and smitten with each other that Adrien and Chloé had ended up friends, it was like they were still caught in some forbidden high school romance fifteen years after they graduated, sneaking around all the time, ignoring their responsibilities to make out. And so, in a desperate attempt to see more of each other (if that was even possible), they left Adrien with Chloé's babysitter. Neither remembered much about that first encounter, considering they had barely developed the ability to crawl let alone partake in polite conversation. But soon it became a habit, Emilie and Gabriel dumping Adrien with Chloé, Audrey and André dumping Chloé with Adrien, and by the age of two, they were fast friends, reliant on each other as they faced the world.

Soon playdates turned into sleepovers, sleepovers turned into spending a week at the other's house, at one point they spent two months tucked away in Adrien's room, watching pre-approved cartoons and animes and movies, re making scenes from these shows in the most dramatic way possible, charging around his bedroom and attacking innocent teddy bears they had dressed as villains. They made comics and wrote stories in crayons, about alternate endings, characters they wanted to date, inserting themselves into the worlds. Intricate (but badly written) fanfiction and fanart, created by their four year old selves. She could of sworn she still had some of them tucked away in books and hidden under loose floorboards in her room. Why she'd hidden them, she wasn't sure. Maybe because they felt sacred, special in a way nothing else could, so personal any one else laying eyes on it would be like walking into a battle field with no armour, exposed and vulnerable.

But then Emilie had left, mysteriously vanished off the face of the Earth. She'd left no note, hadn't called, hadn't even said goodbye to her son. She was gone, quick as the wind, and Adrien was alone. 

They cried a lot that month, locking themselves in Adrien's room, only coming out for essential reasons. But eventually he began to heal, and she let herself stop feeling his pain for him. Gabriel refused to say what happened, hiding away in his office, not even speaking to Adrien anymore, but Chloé overheard her mother screaming about twins and cousins and betrayal... it was hard to piece together. She'd tried to see Adrien every day after his mother vanished, but Nathalie turned her away at every attempt, only permitting her to visit the boy once a month. But finally, after a year, they managed to find away to talk again, video calling each other for so long their phones were eternally on charge, messaging each other early into the morning. And now even that was gone. 

Chloé sighed, wiping away the doodle with the palm of her hand, no point reminiscing about the past, not with all of that so far behind her, left behind in Paris with her only friend, soon to be forgotten.

**Author's Note:**

> Some more headcanons I couldn't fit into the fic:
> 
> Adrien and Chloe are huge nerds, they write fanfic, cosplay, play d&d, all of it.  
> They ended up friends because their parents are all low-key neglectful (including Emilie), and they ended up dumped together all the time.  
> Chloe was the one who got Adrien into school, forged all the signatures, filled out all the paperwork.  
> They used to build pillow forts in Adrien's room- like, so big it might as well be a bedroom, they consider themselves pillow fort masters  
> Whenever they order pizza or eat out, they order a ham and pineapple one, but ask for it to have all the pineapple on one half and all the ham on the other, Adrien eats the pineapple half cause he's a psycopath (and a vegetarian), and Chloe eats the ham.  
> They hate olives, but always buy a pot of them when they have sleepovers, so when they play games like truth or dare, anyone who loses has to eat one (neither has ever turned down a dare since they made that rule)  
> They send really long voice messages of them just rambling about random topics to each other, and they always listen to whatever the other person was going on about  
> They have a joint Ao3 account.


End file.
